A Review of Zak Smith’s

As with so many of the great
encyclopedic works of literature—the Bible, the Divine Comedy,
the Decameron, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost—Thomas Pynchon’s
1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow begs, or perhaps dares, to be illustrated.
With a combination of language and happenings as variegated as the rainbow
itself, Pynchon’s novel evokes every conceivable style of image, from the most
hallucinatory to the most concrete and brutal. Indeed, with its
filmstrip-square section breaks and its famous references to The Wizard of
Oz, Orson Welles (“The Kenosha Kid”), and to a kaleidoscope of other filmic
dreamscapes, it takes the reader’s imagination on a journey as prismatic and
colorful as any febrile Hollywood odyssey.

Clearly
unfilmable, the novel may also be impossible to illustrate with any degree of
fidelity to its maker’s vision. Even Pynchon himself has looked back on the
novel and wondered what in the world he was thinking, suggesting that the
creation may even be beyond the compass of its visionary creator. Every time I
read it, its totality seems more and more difficult to comprehend, but what
becomes clearer each time are the images and imaginings that impress themselves
so deeply into the reader’s consciousness, and this may be what makes Zak
Smith’s new Gravity’s Rainbow Illustrated possible. Rather than taking
on the entire rainbow at once, the way that a classical narrative painter
might—or the way that even a chapter-by-chapter illustrator might—Smith goes
page by page, translating each of his immediate impressions into graspable
images.

Best
known as a “punk-porn” artist, Zak Smith seems an unlikely—and in fact perhaps
even detrimental—candidate for a task such as this. Many prospective readers
blindly turn away from the novel because of its ostensible obscenity (and its
phallic immensity), and having an illustrator who traffics in the lurid and
prurient may simply exacerbate this popular misconception. Yes, Pynchon revels
in Sadean sickness, but that’s only a tiny sliver of the vast rainbow. What’s
remarkable about Smith’s undertaking, however, is that he wasn’t chosen for the
task; he appointed himself to it, uncommissioned, and has given us a highly
personal view that would probably never see the printed page if he’d been hired
by a publisher.

In
Smith’s case, this has its negative and positive effects, because his
undeniably singular vision offers much while still falling far short of the
novel’s full spectrum. Most notable is that he’s illustrating a novel with the
word “rainbow” in the title while the vast majority of his renderings are
simple black-and-white drawings. There are a small fraction of color
illustrations and photographs, but even in his drawings of Dorothy Gale and
friends, the colors are muted and unstriking. The most disappointing
illustration is on page 49, when Pynchon refers, in second person, to “the
sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery,” and Smith
renders this excellent opportunity for self-expression in black ink, making the
illustrator’s own spurt of blood and its accompanying pain almost unnoticeable.

In what seems to
be an afterthought in his foreword, Smith only makes mention of Pynchon’s
language as an extension of the novel’s style of thinking. This is a telling
perspective for an artist to take, as novels and paintings are things in
themselves rather than just invisible windows into the world beyond the medium.
Nobody would just mention the stylistic differences between a Giotto
crucifixion and a Carravagio crucifixion in passing, or say that Ulysses
and Mrs. Dalloway are just descriptions of ordinary life. Each of these
works is as much about the artist’s vision and artistic style as it is the
subject matter or “style of thinking,” and the artist’s “language” can mean the
difference between a Monet and a Picasso.

As
for the artistic language in this collection, Smith mostly speaks in comic-book
crosshatching, minimalist caricatures, and twisted figures that seem overly
influenced by Egon Schiele. In his other works (especially in his labyrinthine 100
Girls and 100 Octopuses) he’s a brilliant colorist and obsessively
meticulous chronicler of his milieu, but the drawings in this collection often
seem derivative and pale.

It would be
somewhat unfair to compare Smith’s illustrations to those of Gustave Doré or the Limbourg
brothers or even John Tenniel, because these artists were commissioned for
their work and had a much different mandate, but in evaluating the relationship between a text its corresponding
images, these are artists worth reviewing. Doré’s drawing for the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote,
Paradise Lost, and so many others are not just brilliantly imagined but
are articulated with amazing thoroughness. Smith states in his foreword
that his own style “is nothing if not thorough,” but in this book’s case, this simply isn’t true. He attempts
to make his illustrations as literal as possible, and he does impressive
research into what the rifles and tanks and ambulances of the novel’s
time looked like, but compared to the Limbourg brothers or any of the other
great medieval illuminators—or to the indelibly memorable Tenniel—these images
simply seem haphazard.

With the helpful
assistance of Joe King, Associate Registrar of Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center (which
holds the drawings in its permanent collection), I got to examine a dozen of
the Gravity’s Rainbow pictures in person, with excellent commentary from
King and from Zak Smith via King. Looking at the pictures’ full texture up
close was more rewarding than I expected—especially the multimedia ones, which
are often ingeniously constructed—but this is a review of their collected book
form, and a lot of these pictures’ vitality has been lost in translation. For a
much richer rendering of Gravity’s Rainbow, see Dr. Larry Daw’s online
version, which only has about seventy-five illustrations but which comes much
closer to Pynchon’s ordered chaos. To fully appreciate Smith’s book, which
Steve Erickson gleefully describes as “doomed to failure” in his Introduction,
I recommend surrounding yourself with them in person and seeing how well they
succeed in enhancing your own vision of Pynchon’s rainbow.